A Christmas Killing Read Free Page B

his contact at Graduate Hospital every fifteen minutes. Miranda Sanchez’s condition had been upgraded from critical to stable.
    Byrne had also called U of Penn. There was no news about Michael Farren.
      
    It was somewhere around the bottom of their second Tullamore Dew that Frank Sheehan finally spoke.
    “Thirty-six fucking years, Kevin,” Sheehan said. “Second time I’ve ever fired my weapon on the job.”
    “It was a clean shoot, Frank.”
    Sheehan shrugged, spun his glass. The juke played Sinatra’s “I’ve Got the World on a String.” The fireplace, and the Dew, began to cut the chill.
    “He’s still dead,” Sheehan said. “And that kid’s in a coma.”
    Byrne chose his words carefully, hoping they were the right ones. “I don’t know much, but I do know this,” he said. “You didn’t put either of them on that corner tonight. What happened tonight is squarely on the Farrens’ doorstep. It has been for a long time.”
    Sheehan drained his drink, corralled the next one.
    “One of these days that might make me feel better,” he said. “Today is not that day.”
      
    Ten minutes later, as Frank Sheehan got off the stool to put on his suit coat, Byrne glanced at the man’s inner forearms, saw the evidence of a number of IV needles: the black and blue marks, the scarring, the bruising. He wondered when the chemo had started for Sheehan. Frank always wore a hat, even indoors, as he was now—and didn’t have that much hair to begin with—so hair loss wasn’t a clear indicator.
    The weight loss, however, was.
    And now this.
    Byrne decided that, as much as he wanted to ask the man about his health, there would be another day, another time.
    Back at the station house, they stood for a long moment in the parking lot. Neither man knew how to end this night.
    “Sometimes this city can get pretty quiet,” Sheehan finally said. “Ever notice that?”
    It was true. Byrne could all but hear the snowflakes land on the ground.
    “Merry Christmas, Frankie.”
    Sheehan smiled, but there was no joy in his eyes.
      
    At just after two am Byrne drove back to the Pocket. He parked across the street from The Stone, got out.
    A few minutes later, the door to the tavern opened. Danny Farren emerged, stood on the sidewalk, under the green neon sign. His eleven-year-old son, Sean, stood next to him.
    The two men found each other in the night, standing on opposite sides of the street, opposite sides of the law.
    Byrne looked at the boy, thought about the song that had been playing in the bodega, “The Little Drummer Boy.”
    A newborn king to see . . .
    Byrne would head home for a few hours’ sleep, then return to the station house, continue to type what would ultimately be a mountain of paperwork. An officer-involved shooting, a dead suspect, a critically injured ten-year-old boy. He’d be lucky if he was done with the paperwork by New Year’s Day.
    The street had been plowed, a fresh coat of snow covered the sidewalks. If you had not been present on this Philadelphia street on this Christmas Eve you would never know that a man lost his life here, or a boy, his childhood.
    These were the sorts of things that, in time, faded into the lore of a neighborhood.
    Even if the people forgot, Devil’s Pocket would remember.
    The Pocket always did.

A Preview of
Shutter Man
    In February 2016 Mulholland Books will publish Richard Montanari’s Shutter Man. Following is an excerpt from the novel’s opening pages.

Who are you?
    I am Billy.
     
    Why did God make it so you can’t see people’s faces?
    So I can see their souls.

1
    July 4, 1976
    On the last night of his life, Charles Martin Flagg, sixty-eight, a childless widower with mild arrhythmia and a limp he’d picked up courtesy of a mortar round while serving as an Army chaplain stationed at Guadalcanal, stood at the western edge of Schuylkill River Park, near the baseball diamond, facing east.
    It was a muggy night. A damp breeze crawled off the river,